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This song is an amusing story of the activities seen by passengers riding on the top of an omnibus, looking into the windows of the houses that they pass. They see a wife flirting with her lodger, a woman chasing her husband with a broom and an elderly gentleman trying to sew his trousers with a nail. The omnibus was a popular form of transport during the Victorian period and they numbered approximately 3,000 by 1855, each carrying about 300 passengers a day. They were known as 'knifeboards' because of the rows of top hatted gentlemen sitting on the top deck. Women travelled inside the buses as climbing the stairs would have given people on the pavements an indecent glimpse of their ankles.